Perhaps the most interesting story to emerge from last night’s announcement of the Costa Prize category winners falls in the realm of biography. The shortlist, which included memoirs and travelogues and covered a striking range of subjects, indicated how broad the judges considered the term ‘biography’ to be. Yet within that, a very obvious contender for the final award was Claire Tomalin’s Dickens: A Life.

Charles Dickens, who is unlikely to be given short shrift this year (the bicentenary of his birth falls on February 7), was many men – journalist, novelist, actor, campaigner, father of ten – with many moods. Famous in his lifetime and exceptionally rich (Tomalin estimates that his second American tour, undertaken three years before his death, earned him the equivalent of £1.4 million in today’s money), he was memorialised and mythologised virtually before his body was cold. Over the following 142 years, so many writers have attempted to describe and diagnose his person that offering any account of him is, in the memorable phrase of one of his latest biographers, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, “like trying to cut up a blue whale with a penknife”. Though Tomalin’s Life is a brick of a book, the surprise is not its sturdiness but its relative concision: she has arrived at a cradle-to-grace offering that takes up a mere 400 pages.

The story of Edward Thomas, on the other hand, edges towards the posthumous. The poet whose influence extended so far that Ted Hughes referred to him as “the father of us all” did not write any poetry until five years before his death on the first day of the Battle of Arras in 1917. What’s more, the man he was before that was constantly under threat from his own mind. And so while Hollis offers us only a slice of a life, it is in a sense the entire life of the man he came to be – the full biography of a five year-old grown man, reborn.

Thomas was an influential literary critic, who struggled to keep up with the amount of hack work (as he called it) he was required to do. He wanted to kill himself, kept in his pocket something he described as his “Saviour” (whether it was a gun or poison is not known), and wrote of his self-disgust at not being able to go through with it. Then he met someone who changed his life: Robert Frost.

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Though Frost is now one of America’s most adored poets, at the time he met Thomas (1913), no one would publish his work in the United States and he had emigrated to England to seek his fortune. London was then an environment of explosive literary agendas (Hollis offers a wonderfully rounded picture of Ezra Pound’s group, and the more traditional poets he disagreed with so virulently that he challenged one of them to a duel), and Thomas the critic was one of its most powerful and fearless arbiters. But with Frost something else emerged. The two men went for long walks in the countryside, and encouraged each other to write lines that followed, in loose poetic form, the sound-patterns of speech. Frost advised Thomas, a habitual note-taker, that he could grow poetry, in effect, from the seeds of his prose.

Hollis, a poetry editor at Faber (in the footsteps of TS Eliot) and a poet himself, performs an extraordinary trick of literary empathy. In relation to Thomas, he is biographer, editor, fellow-poet and summoner of his spirit. In a passage in which he documents the composition of Thomas’s first significant poem, “Up in the Wind”, Hollis uses archival material – Thomas’s drafts and manuscripts – to dramatise the process of writing in free indirect speech. “He paused,” Hollis writes, “this was possibly the first wrong step”. Or: “no, not that”; and: “too long, too harsh”. He reproduces Thomas’s crossings-out, and continues: “Maddeningly, the poem was getting away from him.” You can almost hear the workings of it, as if you were eavesdropping on someone trying out phrases of a song. How often do we get to know writers this way?

In his slicing off of Thomas’s last years, Hollis offers a new kind of life-writing at a time when authors and academics are grappling with just this issue. Hermione Lee, esteemed biographer of Virginia Woolf among others, has just opened a Centre for Life-Writing at Oxford University, which embraces not only biographers but philosophers, anthropologists and novelists, and even engages with the lives of objects. These writers are all investigating an issue that has long confounded historians: that human lives are slippery, fractured and indecipherable, and no documentation of them entirely to be trusted. How to render this problem in writing? A counterpoint to Tomalin’s book in this context might be Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s Becoming Dickens, which looks at the author’s early years exclusively, examining who he might have been – or, as Robert Frost might have said, the roads not taken, before any had been taken at all.

In her review of both Tomalin’s book and Douglas-Fairhurst’s, Frances Wilson described them as “the spirits of biography past and biography yet to come”. It’s worth remembering that Tomalin herself has been the spirit of all sorts of biography – more than 20 years ago she wrote a book about Charles Dickens’s secret lover, Nelly Ternan, so her current head-on look at the man follows something more groundbreakingly askance. Nevertheless, it’s true that we are living through a moment when things are, biographically speaking, up for grabs, and it will be rather exciting to see where Lives go next.